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Kindling Flames
The Blog of GWU Education Policy Students

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Thursday, June 15, 2006

I just heard about Donors Choose, a website that allows classroom teachers to make project proposals and raise money through donations... pretty cool. As a blogger, you can set up a "challenge" and try to get your readers to donate to specific projects... I think that perhaps our hordes of readers could come through for something like this!

12:10 PM :: 0 comments ::

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Immigration and School Finance...Lessons from the Hill

Monday, June 12, 2006

On Friday morning I attended a breakfast briefing on the Hill about immigrants access to quality education in this country. David Shreve, from the National Conference of State Legislatures did a great job explaining the issues from a school finance perspective. (In my personal opinion, anyone who can take a complicated process of school finance and break it down in a way that is easy to understand is an incredibly smart person...and if you want the powerpoint, just email me).

A couple of points Shreve talked about that I found interesting:
* Our education system in incredibly disporportionate (not like that's a big shock or anything, but the stats are ridiculous): The largest 1.6% school districts serve 22% of the student population while the smallest 22% serve 1% of the student population.
*While our school financing is moving from an equity model (where everyone gets the same funding regardless) to an adequacy one (where funding depends on the different needs of districts and their student populations), states are still struggling to figure out what students (ELL and others) need in regards to funding and how much is truly "adequate" to ensure student achievement. And since research has been mixed on how money truly affects student achievement, it's hard to advise legislators on what to do (which can lead to poor policy funding decisions....like class size reduction as an example).
*A big problem in the near future is the baby boomer population taking priority over our children b/c medicaid costs are slowly starting to demand larger chunks of money in states. In fact, over at NCSL, they call Medicaid the "Pac-man of state budgets'." For some reason, I feel like this is a real potential disaster waiting to happen in the next decade or so.
*Advice for education policy makers and advocates: In general Shreve talked about how state legislators, when making these funding decisions are trying to find the "soft spot" between a rock and a hard place. So, of course, I couldn't resist asking him what he thought the "soft spot" was for state legislators when making these decisions. He replied that the "soft spot" for legislators was the economic arguments for education and that those arguments were the most effective in convincing them to vote and pass legislation for more school funding and programming. While I am sure there are other factors that influence state legislators decisions, I thought it was good insight to the state level decision making process.

8:29 AM :: 0 comments ::

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